Friday, March 15, 2013

After 9/11, the United States intensified its
efforts in the international manhunt for Osama bin
Laden (Ricky Sekhon). Nevertheless, the elusive mastermind of the terrorist
attack continued to orchestrate
mass murders in Bali, Istanbul, London, Saudi
Arabia and elsewhere around the world.

Dismayed by the ever-mounting death
toll, the authorities rationalized the use of rough interrogation tactics
bordering on torture in the hope of expediting the capture, dead or alive, of
the slippery al-Qaida leader. He was ultimately tracked down to a walled
compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan where he died on May 2,
2011 during a daring, helicopter raid conducted by Navy SEAL Team Six.

Directed by Kathryn Bigelow, Zero
Dark Thirty is a riveting, super-realistic account of the decade-long search
for bin Laden. Bigelow has again collaborated scriptwriter Mark Boal (The Hurt
Locker), with the pair apparently gaining access to classified materials in
preparing the project.

The film is structured as a tale of
female empowerment revolving around Maya (Jessica Chastain), a cool, calm and
collected CIA agent who manages to keep her head even when so many around her
seem to be losing theirs, literally and/or figuratively. She also has an
uncanny knack for deciphering which clues might be worth following, cutting a
sharp contrast in this regard to bumbling colleagues who fritter away most of
their time on wild goose chases.

At the point of departure, we find
Maya finally getting her first taste of fieldwork after starting her career
boning-up on bin Laden behind a desk in Washington,
D.C. She’s been reassigned to
participate in the questioning of al-Qaida members and sympathizers being
detained at secret sites located outside the U.S. where the Geneva Conventions
provisions relating to torture presumably don’t apply.

Soon, Maya’s chasing clues from Pakistan to Kuwait
to Afghanistan
and back, alongside tone-deaf bosses (Jason Clarke and Kyle Chandler) who could
crack the case quickly if they weren’t such male chauvinists suffering from
Persistent Disbelief Syndrome. That’s the shopworn plot device which pits a
frustrated, unappreciated protagonist against an army of stubbornly skeptical
naysayers.

Whether a convenient, cinematic
contrivance or an accurate portrayal of what transpired, Zero Dark Thirty’s version of history certainly makes for a very convincing piece of
patriotic storytelling. Credit Jessica Chastain for imbuing her character,
Maya, with a compelling combination of vulnerability, sagacity and steely
resolve in a very memorable performance.

CIA Agent Strangelove, or how I
learned to stop worrying and love waterboarding!

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The Sly Fox Film Reviews

KamWilliams.com

The Sly Fox Film Reviews publishes the content of film critic Kam Williams. Voted Most Outstanding Journalist of the Decade by the Disilgold Soul Literary Review in 2008, Kam Williams is a syndicated film and book critic who writes for 100+ publications around the U.S., Europe, Asia, Africa, Canada and the Caribbean. He is a member of the New York Film Critics Online, the NAACP Image Awards Nominating Committee and Rotten Tomatoes.

In addition to a BA in Black Studies from Cornell, he has an MA in English from Brown, an MBA from The Wharton School, and a JD from Boston University. Kam lives in Princeton, NJ with his wife and son.